If you think that’s crazy, there’s a good chance that Tanner’s
auction-price record is about to be shattered.

Recently, a man in California
(we’ll call him Lucky, as he would prefer to remain anonymous),
was reading another article about rare Atari games.
Naturally, Air Raid was mentioned, as was the
$31,600 sale price. Lucky recalled that he’d been given
a sample
copy of the game by a sales rep back in the 1980s when
Lucky was an assistant manager at a drug store that sold video
games. Lucky took the game home, played it for a few minutes, but
decided he didn’t want to order it for the store’s inventory.
When he told the sales rep he could have the game back, the rep
said not to bother because none of his other clients were all
that interested, either. Lucky stuck his copy of Air
Raid in an old Atari display case at home, where it sat
virtually untouched for the next 30 years.

Upon reading the article, Lucky and his daughter scoured through
his old collection and found they had the second known copy
of Air Raid in the box. But unlike the copy
that Tanner bought from a clearance bin at a discount store in
the mid-1980s, Lucky’s Air Raid has never been
in circulation, so the box is in near-perfect condition.

As Lucky and his daughter were taking photos of the box to send
to Albert Yarusso, the owner of AtariAge.com (who personally
examined Sandlin’s Air Raid box in 2010), they discovered
something else tucked inside: the instruction manual. Before now,
there was only speculation that a manual even existed, so this
makes Lucky’s the only “CIB” (Complete In Box) copy
of Air Raid ever found.

After verifying that the cartridge still worked, Lucky and his
daughter put Air
Raid up for sale on GameGavel.com, an auction
site exclusively for video games. Will it break Sandlin’s $31,600
sale-price record? Watch the auction and find out!